


The Vampire Hunters

by nostalgic_breton_girl



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Dawnguard, Dawnguard DLC, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26497726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgic_breton_girl/pseuds/nostalgic_breton_girl
Summary: In which Julienne and Marcurio - long recovered from the defeat of Alduin, occupying themselves with lower profile mercenary work - are tempted into joining the Dawnguard, with all that that ultimately entails.
Relationships: Female Dovahkiin | Dragonborn/Marcurio
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	1. Calm Night

We had arrived at Riften later than expected, and the east – our destination – was already in growing shadow: but, trusting the woodlands more than the city at this hour, we determined to go straight onwards, to Fort Dawnguard. A pretty walk, through darkening woods: our little balls of light curiously illuminating hunting-trails, spider-silk in the grass; the call of an owl beyond, perhaps a wolf, half-imagined, out in the foothills...

It was in pursuit of such a calm night as this one that we sought out the Dawnguard: and it seemed, as we drew closer, that its effect had already conquered the Rift.

We had been told to seek out a pretty little vale, not far beyond the city, and bordered by mountains so steep that a cave in the hillside had been expanded, to create a decent entrance to it. In years past, this entrance had been closely guarded – blocked up, at points, if one believed the tales. Now, apparently, it was for the most part passable, if difficult to find among the vegetation that had sprung up around it.

We had our lights, and a keen sense of optimism; therefore we went confidently. We were not assailed or even approached by any creature, whether of the day or night, until we were close to the place; and then we saw a figure a little ahead of us, came on the defensive a moment, before noticing that it was simply a young man in threadbare clothes, who had not made any move against us.

‘Oh!’ said he: ‘I didn’t see you there.’

Then, seeing to where we were headed:

‘Dawnguard, too?’

‘Wouldn’t shout it too loudly,’ said Marcurio.

‘I think I’ve found the place,’ the man went on, and gestured with the torch he was holding: ‘though... I was actually quite nervous... about entering.’

The confession came haltingly, with an embarrassed little smile. He was scarcely a man, a farm lad, by the looks of it: and though his arms bore the marks of farm work, he did not even have a dagger at his belt, and likely had not wielded a weapon before. Neither of us said anything, though, or judged him, merely let him finish:

‘Well... I’m glad you’ve come. I was... truth be told, I was nervous to go to Isran by myself. I’ve heard he’s intimidating. Not a good first impression for... for a vampire hunter, I suppose,’ he added, self-deprecating, ‘but I wanted to sign up, I heard about the menace, I wanted to help. – You’ve probably killed _loads_ of vampires,’ he said, and his anxious chatter faltered at last.

‘Oh, one or two,’ said Marcurio breezily, which did not help the boy’s confidence much.

I took Marcurio’s hand and pressed it, and put my other hand upon the shoulder of our poor friend.

‘I... I am sure you will be fine,’ I said: ‘really, I am nervous too... I'm always nervous... with new people, anyway.’

‘Not with _you_ , though,’ laughed Marcurio: ‘as long as there’s someone _more_ nervous than her, she’s fine.’

I elbowed him with a laugh, and together we set off towards the cave.

The young man’s name was Agmaer, the son of a farmer, who had spent his whole life in the fields just west of Riften, and who – like so many boys of Skyrim, fuelled by sagas and songs, and by that penetrating sense of warlike optimism – had always wished for adventure. He had scarcely heard about the vampire menace, when he had decided that that was his calling, and having made some enquiries had discovered where he ought to go to sign up. Fort Dawnguard, he said, was hardly unknown in Riften, but it had faded into the remnants of history, and few dared or bothered to go near it (this sentiment exacerbated by rumours of hauntings – or worse): but its recent reanimation had caused quite the stir, and he was sure that there would soon be a small army in it, ready to fight whatever should come its way. And he would be part of it, and that would be his glory.

At once lost among a crowd, and known as one of those who stood up – the sort of glory that soldiers seek. Certainly for one with such a dull childhood and restless imagination, it made perfect sense that this was his wish.

He had just finished his narration, when we reached the end of the dark path, and emerged in the valley about which we had heard so much. It was called Dayspring Canyon: an apt name, for a place bound to banish the darkness, and more charming than the name was, we found, the vale itself.

Oh! – you have never seen such a charming place, even in all Skyrim: and the time at which we came to it, after the sun had disappeared beneath the western horizon, rendered it quite magical. There yet reigned an ethereal sort of light, from everywhere and yet nowhere, dwarfing even our mage-lights, which we let fade in our awe; mountains rising on either side, and a most peculiar sense of sanctuary between them; a stream, visible only by the glinting rapids; and, beyond, the rising silhouette of the fortress. Quite why the builders of the fort had chosen this secluded, hardly accessible canyon was anybody’s guess: but it had been a fine choice, if they had adored the isolation and the overawing beauty of nature.

‘How nice it is,’ I cried.

My voice lingered, in the cold crisp air; reverberated a little, upon the stone about us. I did not disturb anything, by it: rather, the sound seemed to make everything settle, and it was in an absolute calm that we approached the fort.

There were half-barricades already, about the entrance, and standing among them was a figure: a man in shadow, who turned on hearing our footsteps, and smiled when he saw that we were quite the opposite of a threat.

‘Here to join the Dawnguard?’ he called out to us.

Marcurio replied in the affirmative, cast a mage-light that we might all see each other better.

‘Good... I’ll show you in. Isran’s just inside, he’ll decide if you’ve got what it takes. – Have you fought vampires before?’ he asked, half-conversationally, as he drew us towards the great iron door.

Marcurio and I nodded – introduced ourselves as mercenaries; Agmaer said that he had not, but that he was handy with a weapon, a lie he hoped he might not regret later.

‘Good. Going to need all the help we can get, I think. You’re not the first to turn up... but there haven’t been many, it must be said. Still! early days, early days. Let’s see about getting this thing open.’

The lock took a heavy key to match the overbearing door, which was then barred by a series of complicated latches; these he opened deftly, with an apology that ‘Isran always insists that the door be locked, even if I'm right outside’. The door swung open, creaked remarkably upon ancient hinges: and amid high grey walls and an almost unnatural light, the four of us entered Fort Dawnguard.


	2. Light Overwhelming

There is a tendency among vampire-hunters to light overwhelming: it is such a light which they aim to use against their foes. The daylight is our ally and our salvation; and the night that of the vampires; and it is through this irreconcilable binary that the enmity is constructed. The vampire-hunter must, in short – as any hunter, perhaps – learn to see in black and white.

And it is in a very literal sense, that light is the enemy of the vampire: that, I believe, is why the fortress was guarded at its entrance, not by soldiers or creatures, but by an ethereal shaft of light which came through – or perhaps originated from – the ceiling. It was so bright, that it was difficult to discern its source: it was quite evidently not the sun, and so at this hour must be magic, or rebounding candlelight, or perhaps captured moonlight, the latter two by some delicate combination of glass or mirrors. While we would see it much brighter in the days to come, and especially in sunlight, it was still enough to make us blink a little, for the first few moments.

There was beyond the light the figure of a man, who had discerned the door opening and come to meet the visitors. – Impressively tall even for a Redguard; quite the opposite of what I had expected, if I had been expecting a nimble hunter. Though he had, in his armour, the image of a warrior, there was something softer – something he tried his hardest to hide – upon his face, memories of times past... He stepped forth, crossed his arms, studied us all for a good moment before speaking.

I could see Agmaer attempting to conceal his nerves; I too quavered a little, beneath the bristling dark brows of our interlocutor.

‘Well,’ he said, at last: ‘I imagine you are here for the Dawnguard.’

‘We’re looking to join,’ said Marcurio: ‘heard you were looking for volunteers.’

‘There isn’t much to join yet,’ he replied, ‘I have only just started rebuilding: but I'm glad word’s starting to get out. Won’t be long until the vampires begin to take notice as well, though...’

Then, looking us over once more:

‘You’d better introduce yourselves.’

We did so, as we had to our guide, and he named himself as Isran. – He seemed a little put out by Agmaer’s nerves, quite as the boy had feared, but for the moment did not say anything. On the contrary, he seemed satisfied by the claims which Marcurio and I made regarding our previous experience; and unlike a good deal of the residents of Skyrim, he was also much pleased by our being mages, and said that magic would come in very useful, as would in general a variety of battle tactics. While he promised to provision Agmaer with a crossbow (a prospect which made the lad hide a new anxiety), he said that we would surely have no need of one, and that we might demonstrate our grasp of the elements tomorrow.

‘At present there seems to be no pressing business to attend to,’ he went on, ‘but I have a few ideas which I might have you realise, a few people whom I have heard are in Skyrim and whom I should like to find, before things go over the edge. That I shall tell you about tomorrow morning. This evening you should have a good meal and a decent night’s rest. Celann, show them round, won’t you?’

Celann was the man who had shown us in, and who immediately obliged to this request, having nothing else to do, and not wishing to spend his evening freezing his feet outside. Isran – who had been talkative enough, but looked as if he was more than ready to drop his act and dissolve into his own thoughts – went from the room, and we heard his footsteps echoing in the stairwell.

‘Well!’ said Celann: ‘welcome to Fort Dawnguard. It may not look much now, but it’s quite the place. Or so we shall see, when we find a brush long enough to sweep away those cobwebs.’

He was looking rather overconfidently towards the ceiling, shielding his eyes from that blinding light; there were cobwebs in darker corners, and their outer rings glistened while the rest faded into obscurity. – It is the brightest light which casts the darkest shadows. – Leastways, Celann smiled, led us onwards, through to a dining-room.

‘Oh!’ said he: ‘Durak was here not long ago, I’ll introduce you to him if we find him. – This is the dining-room. The fireplace was about the first thing we did up. I don’t know if Isran hopes to get any cooks or servants for the place, but at the moment we all chip in. I’m not so shabby, but –’ he dropped his voice: ‘if Durak makes stew, use a good knife.’

The place was simple, a hearth and a long table; this table was already set, with rather more place-settings than there were Dawnguard members. Certainly they were hopeful about finding members, building the organisation: and given three of us had turned up in one evening, their optimism might not have been misplaced.

The next room was a makeshift bedroom, cots separated by dusty screens. The others had chosen their beds; Isran apparently slept upstairs; Celann invited us to pick a cot.

‘Nothing for couples, then?’ Marcurio said with a raised eyebrow.

‘Sorry. – You could sleep on the floor, but I don’t know if you’d sooner do that than sleep separately.’

‘If you have the rugs and blankets for it; – we have had worse.’

‘You said you were mercenaries? – I imagine you have.’

But at _mercenaries_ , he halted a moment, and in the half-light squinted a little. Whatever were his thoughts, he appeared to want to dismiss them; but something was stopping him, a sense of recognition. – I knew that face, knew what he would say, did not want him to say it.

‘Your name – Julienne –’ said he.

‘Very well,’ said I, resigned, in as quiet a voice as I might manage, among these echoing walls: ‘I am not only a mercenary, but also the Dragonborn of legend.’

‘And I think she’d prefer that you didn’t spread it around,’ put in Marcurio in my defence.

Celann looked between us quite awestruck and baffled; at my comment he had drawn in a breath; at Marcurio’s he tried to pretend he hadn't, and hid his embarrassment with a grin. – The same could not be said of Agmaer, who looked as if he might collapse on the spot.

‘The _Dragonborn_?’ he cried.

‘Not so _loudly_ ,’ said Marcurio.

‘But you’re – you’re –’ He ran out of words, defaulted to self-deprecation: ‘you’re a great hero, I don’t belong here, I'm not even a warrior –’

‘We’ll make one out of you yet,’ laughed Celann, clapping the boy on the shoulder (a gesture which almost knocked him over). His eyes were still on me, however: and though I was dismayed that anyone here should know me beyond my own terms, I did not sense too much of the hero-worship in him, more the same sense which I had found in Mirabelle: he was a Breton, he knew the Dragonborn to be a Breton, and that pleased him more than he would admit.

Agmaer did manage to commit to silence, but I knew that I should not escape his gaping stare, at least not for a few days. I hoped I could trust him not to tell Isran. From the impression which I had got of the latter, I feared that if he knew who I was, he would place upon me more responsibility than I could handle.

But despite everything, the confession had not been as bad as I thought it would be; and we were quickly back to discussing living arrangements, before we decided who would concoct that night’s dinner. I insisted, in few words, that I be seen as a comrade and companion, and not as anything beyond what they were, and Celann complied graciously; Agmaer would perhaps take longer to come round, but he had been overawed by me rather before he knew I was the Dragonborn.

Celann offered to cook that evening: and it was a fine fish stew which greeted us at length – the man hailing ultimately from High Rock, and retaining a few tricks from that province, even if he had spent most of his life in Skyrim. – We ate all together, and even Isran deigned to sit at this egalitarian table, though he did not contribute much to the conversation which animated it.

A charming evening; – and though my fears had near been realised earlier, it surprised me, how quickly I forgot it. Though the Dawnguard as of yet numbered just six members, it was our ready comradeship and our gaiety which would surely win us the day. I had been nervous about joining, about meeting all these new people; Agmaer had likewise, but he spoke more than I did, once his tongue had been loosened by a fine Riften mead that Durak had procured. The fort seemed less intimidating for it: and when we returned to the entrance-hall after dinner, going for a sniff of the night air before bed, the light, though yet present and powerful, was much less overwhelming. 

‘Well!’ said Celann as we were settling down – Marcurio and I in a surprisingly comfortable heap of blankets on the floor – ‘I hear Isran’s task for you is going to involve finding more members for the Dawnguard. We’ll be a fine army, by the end of this.’

Even Agmaer was reassured by Celann’s good spirits, and our chatter faded away amicably, as we went to put out the lights; it was just when the room had been plunged into darkness, that quite to our surprise we heard a clatter from the entrance-hall, and scrambling through the darkened corridors we found Isran holding a broom-handle, by the open door, and shaking his head.

‘Bloody bat,’ he muttered, and closed the door. ‘Don’t know how it got in.’

We did not see the offending creature, and I thought it a shame, for I have always had a fondness for bats; but Isran did not think the same, as Celann explained to us, when we had returned to the dormitory. – There has never been a definite connexion between bats and vampires, but these dark creatures of the night are not, it seems, favoured among vampire-hunters: and Isran, paranoid as he was, had interpreted the surprise appearance of one as some kind of malice, or an omen. – And the rest of us smiled; Agmaer told us about a family of bats he had once found nesting in a barn; we went back to bed; but it could not be denied that the evening’s mood had been fractured somewhat, and that whether the bat had been benign or not, there was something curiously unsettling about the whole matter. 


End file.
